Tesla Starts Full Self-Driving Beta Rollout | Hacker News Reader

Tesla Starts Full Self-Driving Beta Rollout

electrek.co

33 pointsjohntb8633 comments

I find it amazing how Tesla has been able to sell - for thousands of dollars - something that doesn’t exist. Really, it’s extraordinary - sell a FSD package (before there’s any proof it’s even technically possible in the operating life of the vehicle) and then roll out random features and claim they meet the original commitment.

And, even better, their customers love them for it.

I could never do this - I would see it as an act of breathtaking dishonesty. Guess that’s one reason why I’m not going to found a billion dollar company.

They never made those claims. Are you being honest about it?

I meant selling a “Full Self Driving” package and the doing (for example) this:

https://www.tesmanian.com/blogs/tesmanian-blog/tesla-autopil...

I don't mean to insult or claim you're not thinking thoroughly or clearly, but this appears to me to be gross oversimplification of several deep topics wrt developing new technologies, the mission to advance the advent of sustainable energy and transport, and founding billion-dollar companies.

Also I think it's intellectually dishonest to claim you would be incapable of your perceived level of dishonesty, because you yourself are selling the idea that it's dishonest based on these gross oversimplifications.

It is dishonest to sell a product that doesn't exist, that seems pretty simple.

Don't tell Kickstarter. :)

Kickstarter has never really been a pillar of honesty in the online community, has it?

If customers understand that it's not yet in existence, what is the dishonest part?

"Beta" self-driving software sounds like an incredibly bad idea. The notion that they are rolling it out to "expert and careful drivers" makes no sense.

Is there a tap-through EULA where Tesla disclaims your potential death?

Yeah they do have that disclaimer before autopilot can be enabled in the settings

Doesn't every car come with a, "if you crash from not paying attention, we are not liable"

The promise of self driving isn't that you can not pay attention, at least not yet.

In fact the user experience of FSD is that you must continue to pay attention.

Having an engaged driver monitoring the FSD system is _part of how we develop this tech_ it's how it advances, from human guidance and intervention on error.

Beta users are effectively the trainers for the last-mile aspects of FSD that are still in development.

As long as Tesla makes this clear, I don't see a problem with it. The problem will always be the people who don't RTFM or who don't follow the rules and guidelines, and win Darwin awards for the hubris/negligence.

> Doesn't every car come with a, "if you crash from not paying attention, we are not liable"

The other cars having to drive next to this car in the road don't get a warning!

So no different than the status quo, the human is responsible in both cases and the other road users don’t get any warnings the human is being irresponsible in either case

Just yesterday I was almost killed while driving back home, because some jackass left a camo-painted trailer in a poorly-lit alley right next to my home. There is no “autopilot” that could spot it in the dusk / sunset. Until Tesla adopts a Lidar, I wouldn’t use the “full self-driving system”

Not trying to troll, but your two 'cameras' were able to identify it without LIDAR, why shouldn't two or more of Tesla's / name your manufacturer?

The dynamic range of your eyes vastly exceeds any "normal" camera on the market today and have much better low light sensitivity. Not only that, they're paired to a biological supercomputer whose "programming" is more powerful, efficient, and robust than anything currently in silicon. It's certainly possible to drive autonomously with cameras-only, but it's very much an open question whether we can do so safely today.

And yet with our two cameras, we still get into a lot of accidents. Why would we not want to improve upon that with additional sensors like LIDAR?

So you're going to hold off riding in vehicles with human drivers until they get augmented with LIDAR as well?

To be clear, I am not saying don't use LIDAR. I was calling out OP's statement that they would feel unsafe in a car without LIDAR since it was unable to detect an unsafe condition that they detected themselves without LIDAR.

because Tesla uses 3 front facing Black/Red ~1000x600 36 frames per second cameras mounted in the center with no ability for parallax.

> There is no “autopilot” that could spot it in the dusk / sunset.

Are you saying you were driving on autopilot in a Tesla and it didn't spot it or you were driving a normal car and couldn't spot it?

If the later, you're assertion that because it was hard for you to see a computer wouldn't be able to is pretty strange. There's plenty of sensors that can spot a stationary object in the way even though it's camouflaged to humans, IR being the most obvious.

Not to mention radar, which every Tesla has.

Radar isn’t great at detecting stopped objects especially when the sensor is moving at highway speeds, which is why most AV companies are using LIDAR

The situation described by the GP doesn’t sound like highway speeds. Regardless, most AV companies use a combination of LIDAR, radar, and vision (which you probably already know - just clarifying.)

I'm curious about the details of how a trailer in an alley could almost kill you, were you going highway speeds down an alley?

How close did you come to colliding with it before your eyes and brain prevented this?

I am also confused by this. Alleys (at least in California and Texas) have speed limits of 15 mph.

You don't have a lidar sensor in your head. You have binocular vision. There is no reason we can't achieve parity with human ability with a camera suite. In my opinion lidar is a fools errand. Also I would not expect a tesla to be speeding down an alley.

Perhaps that will be possible someday, but we still don't have affordable cameras that can match the dynamic range of the human eye. Cameras have superior resolution but they struggle when the scene is unevenly lit.

If we’re just designing a system that is just as good as humans, your argument makes total sense. But it looks like we want a system that makes fewer errors and doesn’t doze off and has no alcohol issues. So it’s perfectly acceptable to want something that can also see a little bit better in the dark.

The implication here is that visual object detection in the weak link in human driving safety: I would counter that distractibility and poor response times are the weak link.

The human eye can detect two photons so the brain can identify a star in the night sky. Show me a camera suite that can do that.

I don’t think we can “see” two photons. The brain will filter that away as noise. Cameras definitely can though :)

> The human eye is capable of detecting a single photon, the smallest unit of light, according to a new study.

Google is not your friend, but it searches this just fine.

Did you look at that study? N=3 getting it wrong most of the time...

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